The alleged theft of CIA hacking tools by one of the agency's own officers — the worst data loss in CIA history — exposed a culture of "woefully lax" security around the agency's dangerous cyberweapons, according to an internal report made public Tuesday, NBC News reported.
The report, first published by the Washington Post, was provided to reporters by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who frequently criticizes the CIA. Wyden said the report made clear that intelligence agencies should lose their current exemption from government-wide cybersecurity standards.
The October 2017 report examined what led up to the publication of some of the CIA's hacking tools by WikiLeaks in March 2017. Prepared by a CIA task force devoted to WikiLeaks, the report was introduced into evidence in the criminal trial of Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee who worked in the agency's elite hacking unit center. Schulte faces a second trial after a jury in New York deadlocked in his case earlier this year.
The public version of the report went unnoticed in the court record until Wyden obtained a copy from the Justice Department and provided it to the Post.
